


Unbrined

by Eisenschrott



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-04
Updated: 2016-01-04
Packaged: 2018-05-11 15:29:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5631598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eisenschrott/pseuds/Eisenschrott
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>General Veers' battlefield heroics come at a price; Piett is concerned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unbrined

Two hundred seventy-six Imperial casualties, one hundred eighty-three wounded. Colonel Covell had had someone count the Rebel casualties, too, and Admiral Piett had read the report page stating that figure. However, he found he cared little. So little that he forgot it as soon as his comlink pinged, and it turned out to be a medical officer informing him, as he’d demanded to be, that General Veers had been operated without complications, and was currently undergoing bacta treatment.

“Is he awake?” Piett could hear the anxiety in his question, and if the medic was not a dullard, she did too.

“Monitoring sensors indicate he is, sir, but of course he won’t be able to speak as long as he remains in the tank.”

Piett did not temporarily abandon his paperwork and his office to go and _speak_ with him. He stood in front of the tank, making a conscious effort to look the part of a commanding officer checking on another high-ranked colleague, out of no deeper worry than a professional one: back straight and hands behind it, feet spread half a meter apart, the blank face he used to wear for days non-stop during his captaincy under Admiral Ozzel.

Half his mind was on the questions he asked the medidroid on the general’s conditions.

The other half wanted to shout, either to vent out twenty years’ worth of _everything_ or to wake the man floating inside the tank. To test if he would just crack his eyes open. It would be enough.

Open pneumothorax, the reports said. For all it had been sealed, Veers’ chest was a mass of fiery red flesh, the bigger hole scarily close to the heart and a cluster of burns all around. By sheer luck his ribs and sternum had not split, upon impact, into anything more severe than minor non-displaced fractures the bacta would take care of. Although he cuirass had saved him from being burned through, cracked bits of fleximetal had stuck into his chest and the singed clothes underneath had meshed to his skin.

Nasty stuff to look at (in Piett’s experience, even worse to smell), but these wounds were evidently well-treated. There was no reason at all why, despite the calm voice of experience, Piett should feel his stomach lurch.

There were cut marks striping Veers’ arms, a purple stain that could be a wound or a bruise on his right temple, and Piett did not find it in himself to ask the medidroid what had caused those. The casualties report only mentioned the sucking chest wound. He should get angry, have the medical officer dragged here and give them what-for. But he couldn’t get angry while his brain swam in a lake of dizziness, and his legs were so wobbly inside the supporting frames of his boots. That stage of a senior officer’s life cycle, he thought bitterly, when even relief makes one feel like a trampled-over dewback turd.

Instead, he laid a hand on the tank’s glass wall. “Max, I know you can hear me.”

Veers jerked up his head and bubbles flared around the respirator.

“I don’t know what possessed you to do what you did,” Piett tried his best to adopt the tone of mild boredom he reserved for junior officers who asked dumb questions (better those than naval ensigns setting out to execute an operational plan with unclear ideas, sure, but some questions _were_ dumb and most naval ensigns existed to prove it). With some luck, the tremor in his voice was inaudible. “You will be hailed as a hero, and it’s all good and fair. However, as your direct superior, we’ll have a word on the… _appropriateness_ that you throw away your life like that. You aren’t a captain anymore, General.”

This made him open his eyes, and splutter out so many bubbles that they hid his frown. At last he realised the futility of talking back as long as the respirator was stuck to his face, and clammed up. Piett could easily imagine the puckered lip under the breathing apparatus, and it made him hold the general’s glare with a smirk.

“Oh, yes, I did read the reports.” he went on, leaning closer to the tank. “You behaved like a silly greenhorn officer obsessed with proving his mettle. I would have already demoted you, if your injuries weren’t enough of a punishment.”

Veers kicked on the glass. It didn’t break, but the thud and the subsequent shrieks of instrumentations attracted a medidroid. Piett stepped aside, and among the beeping he recognised the sound of his own comlink. He was already firing off orders as he turned and trotted out of the medbay.

It didn’t occur him until hours later, catching a glimpse of the army general staff’s mournful faces in the mess hall (the light colour of bandages stuck out in the sea of grey and black uniforms, forks picked at food that was not eaten beyond a few bites), that he might have been indelicate in his last dealing with Veers. Ill-advised as it had been, his heroic charge had helped break through the enemy’s front and speed up the favourable outcome of the battle—a task any gutsy lieutenant could have achieved, though that would have given the propaganda a smaller mouthful to chew on, what with having to build a new hero from scratch rather than adding extra laurels to the well-set legend of Iron Max Veers.

However, shame had no part in him not visiting the general again: there was a mop-up operation to enact across the star system. When Lord Vader deemed the slaughter satisfactory, forty standard hours had passed; while the supreme commander oversaw the repairs to his personal starfighter himself, Piett was allowed to finally meet again his bed and solid food that didn’t come in ration bars.

A medbay communiqué, stating that General Veers had been discharged, awaited at the top of the pile of unread messages in his inbox. And to think he had chided himself for acting like a lovesick schoolboy, when he’d set up the priority filter to use the general’s name as keywords…

His heart jumped in his throat when he scrolled to the second message in the pile: _Just got unbrined. Going to lie down in my quarters till the war’s end. Drop by when you can, you [redacted by the profanity filter]_.

Piett checked on the chrono: it was early, he had an hour before his office hours started. He could eat a proper breakfast at the cafeteria, or get some paperwork filled in advance. Instead, he fished a leftover quarter of ration bar from the pocket of his wrinkled yesterday’s trousers, and ate it on his way to Veers’ quarters. He rang at the intercom before the second guesses could catch up with his quick step. The door didn’t open, nobody answered.

 _You have one try_. The war wouldn’t wait for his fretting. And in all honesty, if Veers was angry at him he had every right to be so—but why would he invite him to his cabin? He almost turned and walked back to work. Not a flight in the least; he did have work to do.

“What am I doing,” he muttered, slipping a code cylinder from his uniform pocket and inserting it in the lock. The door slid open at once.

The interior of the cabin as tidy as ever, with the glaring exception of boots and uniform parts scattered on the floor.

“This can only be you, Firmus,” said a sleepy voice from the bed. “Come in.”

He did, letting the door lock behind him.

Veers was half-sitting, half-lying on the bed, propped on his elbows and the pillow stuffed under his shoulders. He wore nothing but pants, socks, and bandages blueish with bacta salve; they snaked around his upper body, encasing it from midriff to collarbone. Patches stuck to his arms and legs, and a smaller one to his right temple.

“What idiot authorised your discharge?” Piett’s command bridge voice rose.

“Oh, nobody,” Veers shrugged, and a frown of pain shaded his smirk, “just the _Executor_ ’s chief medical officer. I’m sure _you_ are qualified to question her judgment.”

Piett huffed. “Did you summon me in the vain hope to treat me to a jump scare?”

“If I would, I could call it a success. But... well, take a better look.”

The slight drawl in his voice directed Piett’s eyes to the bulge in his pants.

“Max—”

“No, I’m not inclined to give a damn about your scruples, Admiral. I’m alive, well enough to function, and I am going to celebrate that.” Veers beckoned him over.

“You’re impossible.” Piett was about to stomp off, back to his paperwork. Of their own accord, instead, after a minimum wavering his feet carried him towards the bed, and he found himself sitting on it, kissing lips that waited already parted. Even before easing his tongue in, he tasted the syrupy hint of the medication.

Veers pulled him into a tighter kiss, running a hand over his shoulders and into his hair, slipping off his cap. It lingered there, carefully ruffling up the still-neat result of the morning shower and comb.

Piett closed his eyes, let Veers return the kiss, felt the fingertips in his hair trail down to that certain sensitive spot on his neck. A light scratch made him shiver, and place a hand on Veers’ chest to steady himself.

He barely had the time to register something that was not bare skin under his palm, then Veers cringed away with a yowl.

“Damn it.” Piett sat up, his breathing a bit accelerated. From up close, the wrapping was even more impressive; it fitted the form of the body underneath, bunching it up a few centimetres. No alarming dark stain had materialised on the bacta-infused gauze.

“Sorry. Gaping wound and—”

“A dozen minor burns. I know. And I am the sorry one here.”

Veers’ right hand rose to brush its knuckles on his cheek. Piett counted four patches of different sizes, like the samples a MedCorps officer would stick on a dummy at a first aid lesson, between the wrist and the humerus. The typical cutting wounds one receives in combat against sharp weapons.

“But you are an idiot,” Piett whispered. A finger slid over his lips. If it was a cue to be silent, he ignored it. “You don’t have a stormtrooper armour sewn into your skin, you know?”

Veers grinned. His hand hovered down to the shoulder buttons of Piett’s tunic, and picked them open. “Let’s see if you do.”

He knew very well where to stroke and where to pinch inside the flap of the admiral’s tunic, through the synth-cotton of the shirt. It was shameful that such a lazy one-handed groping was enough to reduce him to a quivering, gasping immobility, to make his heart stomp in its cage, his skin cover with goose bumps, his pants grow snug and his vision hazy. With a shakier grip than that of the wounded man near him, Piett unbuckled his belt and pulled his tunic fully open.

Veers hummed in approval. “Could you get a bit closer, dear?”

For all his practised skill at barking orders, when he wanted Veers had a voice of velvet. Like now. Piett bit his lower lip and tried to think of a way to adjust himself on the bedside without touching the wounds (not an easy task given the general’s bulk and the injuries’ extent), and in the meantime Veers grunted, “Damn the navy’s deployment times…”

As soon as he rolled over on his side, the rest of the insult died out into a groan.

“Idiot.”

In-between a ragged breath and the next, Veers said, “Yes, I am—mostly alright, thanks—thanks for asking.”

“You clearly are not in the condition to—”

“Finish that sentence, Admiral, and you will be in no condition to _crawl_ back to the bridge.” Uttering so long a threat made Veers pant with effort.

“…or in the condition to think straight, either.”

“It’s not the first time I get shot! Been here before, when you weren’t around to worry for me.”

That stung. For all it made no sense that it should sting. “I know. But now you are on my watch, and I won’t allow you any such rash move again, General.”

It must hurt him to speak and protest, and so Veers didn’t talk back. However, Piett recognised the moping eyes from earlier in the medbay. The infantry is called like this because the soldier is like an infant, he’d read somewhere long ago; now it made sense.

“Very well,” he said, pulling the flap of his uniform closed. “Take care of yourself.” The general had been irresponsible, indeed, but didn’t deserve to be left without a goodbye kiss; Piett bent over to brush his lips on Veers’ cheek.

A tough core of his brain, operating on permanent alarm mode, warned him of a motion outside his field of vision. He didn’t move.

Veers grabbed a fistful of his shirt and pushed him down. Slow by the boxer’s standards, but bloody fast for an injured soldier on the mend. Piett sighed but stayed still, lest he bumped onto a wound, as Veers positioned himself on all fours over him. If his breathing was so laboured it was for the bandage, not for the arousal; Piett could tell the difference. He cautiously traced his fingertips along Veers’ left shoulder, following the arc of the rock-hard trapezius. He still had his gloves on, and it was a good thing: the hand inside was too cold for comfort. “This won’t do you good.”

The fist clutching his shirt tightened, pulling some hairs underneath; Piett winced at the flash of pain.

“Losing General Maximilian Veers won’t be good for the Empire, I get that.” Veers drew two deep breaths, and something somewhere down his body creaked softly. Pray it was just the bandage. “What I don’t get is, why do you pretend it’s patriotic concern alone that moves you? Eh, Firmus?”

“General, I—”

“Spare me the formalities.”

Piett snorted. “If that is your problem, I assure you that your death would have devastated me on a personal and sentimental level, as much as professional. Shall I scrounge up some mushy words to tell you how much I love you and I’m happy you came back, so you can finally agree to let go of me and get some rest?”

The grip relented, only for the purpose of undoing the buttons of Piett’s shirt. “I can make you mean those words, you know?” Stars, the way he grinned. How many times had he made that face even if wounded, in victory or simply in a rush of combat adrenaline?

“I mean them. Don’t… don’t insult my feelings.” His best judgment be damned, desire now was making Piett’s voice squeak like a lad’s. Veers took to give him another pass of stroking: without the shirt to put up a token resistance, every sensitive spot of his torso lay bare, and the consummate ground tactician exploited each one of them mercilessly. His lips and tongue made up the second wave of the attack, and Piett was past caring for decorum already, one hand rubbing circles over the breadth of Veers’ shoulders and the other in his hair.

The lower Veers slid, the louder Piett gasped. He held on tight, bracing himself, when his trousers dropped above his knees; he squirmed to get more skin out of them.

“Stop pulling my hair—ah!” Veers clasped an arm around his chest and panted through gritted teeth.

“Shit, have I kicked you?”

“Never mind. Sorry… sorry to keep you waiting.”

“I didn’t even ask for this,” Piett mustered an acceptable degree of righteous anger despite the tremolo. _And I shouldn’t have accepted it_. The anger was all at himself. Avoiding to look Veers in the eyes, he tried to slink out of the embrace. The evasive action ground to a wheezing halt as Veers grabbed his crotch, hard enough to make him cry out.

“I’m not done with you, sailor.” The snarl could be pain, could be Iron Max’s brand of vindictive lust, could be leftover fighting zest, or a combination of all. It melded Piett to the mattress almost more effectively than the hold on his cock.

“Just… just be more careful.”

“Yes, yes.” Veers puffed out the rest of the pain and bent over Piett’s crotch. He got his pants halfway down the thighs, with fingers trembling, before he had to drop on his back next to Piett, using up what breath he had to curse the Rebel infantrymen and their ancestors to the fourth generation.

That was it. Piett pried Veers’ fingers, suddenly slack, off his crotch and helped him crawl to a more comfortable position up the mattress, until his brown-and-silver infuriatingly thick head rested on the pillow. “Idiot.”

“You already called me that.”

“Where does it hurt?” His brain, in the meantime, began sorting the least incriminating words in which to justify the summon of a medical team.

The general offered him a shut-eyed bitter smile. “I’d sooner tell you where it doesn’t.” He pointed a thumb downwards. Piett wondered if calling him an idiot for the third time would count as a failure to do his utmost in the eternal navy/army war of wits.

“Max, please—”

“I am the one saying it here.”

A large rough-skinned hand clamped on the side of Piett’s neck. The thumb swept gently over his jaw and poked into his mouth.

“Please, Firmus. Please.”

Damn him, damn his voice, damn Human sexuality as a whole. While a decent fragment of his mind found some measure of comfort in imagining a quick dive for his clothes and a dash out of this cabin, Piett shuffled down on the mattress. “Sorry, I forgot my boots on,” met no answer, and the thought of wasting more time in taking them off was swatted away at once.

The battle had been sportsmanlike and avoided hitting under the belt. Piett brought his lips along old, near-invisible scar lines on Veers’ inner thigh; when he reached the leg of his briefs he started nibbling, through the cloth and along the edge, slowly sinking his teeth in synth-cotton and skin that still tasted of bacta. And Veers’ reaction… One had to wonder what the galaxy would think of the toughest land forces commander in the Imperial Army, if they could hear his mewling now, the submissive animal noises interspersed with _please_. On another day, Piett would have mocked him, teased him all the way to the hyperspace jump.

He stroked Veers’ hips. “Can you—”

“Give me some credit, shrimp.”

To be extra safe, Piett held him from under his loins for support. He craned his neck, bit onto the waist of the slips, and pulled them down; on the go, his nose brushed against greying locks of hair and the tip of the other man’s cock.

Lowering Veers again, he heard him exhale loudly at the liberation. Not that he wasn’t acquainted with the sensation, or with that detail of Iron Max’s anatomy, but… yes, he did see his point. Taking the first warm morsel of erection in his lips, he glanced up to Veers’ bandaged chest rising and falling—worry stabbed at him again; could a body so battered get any good from this kind of exertion?—then to his flushed, glassy-eyed face. All doubts vaporised in one blink and a soundlessly mouthed begging.

He went down on Veers with an eagerness that did not surprise him anymore, let alone embarrass him. Too many off-duty hours had been spent together, and the general had had too close a scrape with death. The whimpers he made, occasionally coalescing into his first name, forced Piett to dispatch a hand to his own raw meat. He couldn’t hold back a low moan, with all that his mouth was full; muffled through the throb of his bloodstream in his ears, a hiccupped sound of laughter reached him. Then a soft, unsteady touch at the top of his skull; it barely even moved to rumple his hair.

 _You daft dirt-pounding bastard, I love you_. And there was no better way in the universe to sum up that hot sweeping feeling, without the saccharine weakness that words entailed, than by a particularly hard sucking.

The payback was a hard pull, so much it killed the mood, and a howl of pain.

Piett drew himself up on his knees. “What in the nine hells was…?” One look at the teeth-grinding grimace on Veers’ face, and he wanted to slap himself for not being able to tell the difference between the good kind of heavy breathing and the one you do to resist under duress. “I told you this couldn’t be good.” He stumbled over to the side of the bed and struggled to pull up his pants and trousers. No way he could walk anywhere publicly in this state. “I’ll be using your shower for a few minutes.”

Veers grabbed his wrist. “You’re not going.”

“Can’t you hold it in your pants until you’re healed? What are you, a sixteen-years-old?” He shot Veers a pointed look, head to groin. No stains on the bandages, thank the stars. “My condolences, General, but in case you didn’t notice, those glory days are long past.”

Veers squeezed so stiffly that Piett feared a few carpal bones might crack. The ceiling spun and for a terrifying instant he thought the ship was heaving, and next thing he knew, he was shoved flat on his back, feet dangling over the edge of the mattress, arms spread and pinned down, and one meters ninety of boxer-shaped fury, miraculous survival to Rebel blasters, and barely restrained thirst, kneeling between his legs.

“Long past?” growled Veers. He drew in a deep, snorting breath, during which Piett had to wonder if he shouldn’t have known the dumb old berk would have reacted like this—and what if he _had_ known, and sought to provoke him?

Veers leaned in and bit onto his shoulder. Not hard enough to truly hurt, but Piett wailed all the same, out of something else than suffering; Veers took the cue and began pounding.

If it was impatience or a remaining scrap of consideration that kept him from attempting a full buggering, Piett neither knew nor cared: his own loaded artillery rubbed hard against the belly of the man atop him, and it wasn’t long until he arched his back and, for a few endless seconds of bliss, forgot about the whole galaxy outside Veers’ arms.

The dirt-pounder was close to it, too. In the post-release haze, Piett felt him lean back and charge up for the final thrust—which he didn’t feel coming. What he did feel was Veers’ weight suddenly dropping onto him and knocking out of his lungs what little wind they’d restocked.

“Son of a Hutt, get off…!” he croaked into his ear, to no avail. Not even a wisecrack. “Max? Max?”

Veers didn’t budge. The hold on Piett’s wrists had gone limp, and he shook them free; pushing the unconscious big man off him was not as easy. He checked the pulse on his neck, and it seemed normal; too normal, indeed—weak for a man in the middle of a shag. Then Piett noticed the dark areas on the chest bandage, getting wider centimetre by centimetre.

 _Oh, poodoo_.

Blood was also trickling down his left arm, from under the bigger patch, and onto the grey sheet.

“Oh, poodoo!”

Piett yanked up his trousers, stains of another kind be damned, and tore the comlink off his belt before even picking the latter off the floor. “Admiral Piett here. Send a medical team to General Veers’ quarters.”

“What happened, sir?”

He bit his tongue for comming the senior medical officer instead of some easily intimidated orderly. “His wounds have reopened and he’s out cold.”

The medical officer issued a swift string of orders to some invisible subordinates, whom Piett heard say “yes ma’am” in the background. “They’ll be there in five minutes, sir,” she said. “Permission to speak frankly?”

“Granted.”

“How the hell did he manage to rip those stitches?”

“He said he slipped in the ‘fresher, and fainted before I could ask the details.” He switched off the comlink, and broke all speed records in wiping himself approximately clean, dressing up, and throwing the bedsheets for decency’s sake over Veers, before the medics barged in pushing a repulsor gurney.


End file.
